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What do you do once you've built a 450-square-metre underground park? If you're Daniel Barasch and James Ramsey, you make it 100 times bigger. In October 2015, ex-Googler Barasch and former Nasa satellite engineer Ramsey, both 39, raised $223,506 (£170,000) on Kickstarter and took over a downtown warehouse in New York City to create the indoor Lowline Lab.

Now, after 75,000 visitors, they have stage-one approval from the city's authorities to move into an abandoned underground trolley terminal nearby, extending their urban garden across 4,000 square metres of subterranean space.

The Lowline's skylight system uses external Sun-tracking parabolic dishes to gather and concentrate sunlight to 30 times its regular intensity. Internal optics filter out the hot rays, and the incoming sunlight is then distributed in a modulated way, to suit the vegetation - including exotic plants, mosses and hops. "Tropical species do best, but flowering varieties have also done very well," says Barasch.

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The trolley terminal lies beneath Delancey Street, one of the main traffic thoroughfares in Manhattan, so finding enough real estate at street level to plug in the skylights will be a challenge.

Underground, it's constrained by centuries of infrastructure, but the space has bonus features too, such as corrugated ceilings which can house the skylights that bathe the space in light.

Barasch and Ramsey still need to raise a further $10 million and to present a detailed plan before the city fully approves the idea - if they get the green light, the park is scheduled to open in 2021.

Already, the concept has sparked interest in Moscow, Paris, Seoul and from the team developing London's Elizabeth line. "This becomes a universal concept for almost any city in the world," Barasch says. "I hope it signals a new trend of taking back spaces that are unused and repurposing them for the public good."

This article was first published in the December 2016 issue of WIRED magazine